1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a machine translation system for translating a plurality of sentences, and more particularly to a pre-edit support method and apparatus for machine translation systems.
2. Description of the Related Art
It is not realistic to expect perfect automatic translation by machine translation systems of present state-of-the-art. As a means for improving the accuracy of translation, a manual support method has been proposed. For example, as described in JP-A-59-140582, it is known to supply translation support information prior to or at the intermediate stage of translation. Of such methods, a method of indicating part of a source text to be processed as an integral part such as a phrase or a clause, for example, by parenthesizing it, is used as a general pre-edit support method in machine translation systems.
Such a method, however, requires a number of operation steps because it is necessary for a user to read a source text and search for the text positions to which support information is to be supplied.
In order to solve such inconvenience, there is known another pre-edit support method as described in JP-A-1-35661, whereby candidate positions to which support information is to be supplied are presented to a user.
In sentences used in the scientific and technical field, which sentences are a main objective of machine translation systems, technical terms of a complex word composed by a plurality of words frequently appear. Such a complex word is generally to be treated as a single integrated word, because it is often difficult to obtain a correct translation of the complex word from a simple combination of translations of words constituting the complex word. In this connection, there is known a method of extracting complex words from a text having a plurality of sentences, as JP-A-1-102679.